I woke up this week with that particular kind of dread that sits in your chest before your brain has fully caught up. The kind that says, "Something is wrong, and you already know what it is."
The Trump-Vance administration submitted its fiscal year 2027 budget request to Congress on April 4th. Buried inside a proposed $166 million increase in FBI counterterrorism spending is a new entity called the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center — a direct follow-up to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 from September 2025. And among the ideological categories this new center is tasked with targeting?
“Extremism on migration, race and gender.”
People who oppose “traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”
In plain language: us.
Trans people. Queer people. Anyone who doesn’t fit the extremely narrow, biblically-defined box that a small group of powerful men have decided is the only acceptable way to exist as an American.
They called us terrorists.
Let’s fucking talk about that.
What Cold Dread Feels Like When It Has a Budget Line
This isn’t a hypothetical anymore. It’s not a fringe Twitter take or a Heritage Foundation fever dream that will never see the light of day. It’s a budget request. It has line items. It has a name — NSPM-7 — and the full institutional weight of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the White House behind it.
The same FBI that tracks actual terrorist cells. The same FBI that investigates mass shootings, domestic extremism, and foreign interference. That organization now has a proposed mandate and budget to investigate people whose crime is existing outside what Stephen Miller considers morally acceptable.
I am a queer, polyamorous woman in a loving triad. My partners include a trans man. Under the language of this budget proposal, the way I live and who I love constitutes ideological extremism.
Let that land.
Not because I threw a bomb. Not because I threatened anyone. Not because I did a single goddamn thing except refuse to perform a heteronormative life I was never meant to live.
That is what they mean by “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” Existing differently is now a national security threat.
This is not a drill.
Why This Is Fascism. Full Stop.
Let’s not soften this with academic hedging. Fascism has a definition, and this meets it.
Fascism is the merger of state and ideological power to enforce conformity, eliminate dissent, and target designated groups as existential threats to the national body. It doesn’t always arrive in jackboots. Sometimes it arrives in a budget spreadsheet.
The playbook is not subtle:
Step one: Define a group as ideologically dangerous. Frame their existence — not their actions, their existence — as a threat to the nation’s values, safety, and way of life. The Trump budget does this explicitly: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” in the same sentence as “extremism on gender.” Being trans is placed in the same ideological threat category as wanting to overthrow the government.
Step two: Create institutional infrastructure to surveil, monitor, and target that group. The NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center isn’t a committee that writes reports. It is a law enforcement hub with a budget, personnel, and a mandate to proactively pursue these targets.
Step three: Normalize the framing until the public stops questioning it. When you call queer people terrorists often enough, people stop asking whether that’s accurate and start asking how many of them there are.
This is how it works. It has always worked this way. History is not subtle about this.
The fact that it isn’t law yet — that the definition of domestic terrorism still requires an act of Congress to formally change — is the thinnest possible comfort. The intent is documented. The infrastructure is being built. And history is very clear about where this road leads when nobody stops it.
Why It Matters to Fight. Why You Do Not Get to Sit This One Out.
I hear it already. It’s just a budget proposal. It’s not the law. Don’t be dramatic.
I am going to need you to understand something.
The trans community has been watching this escalation in real time for years. What looks like a dramatic leap to outside observers is, to us, the logical next step in a decade-long incremental strategy. They called it themselves — “radical incrementalism.” A quarter of the enchilada now, then more later.
In 2026, 740 bills are under consideration across the country targeting trans and gender non-conforming people. That number is expected to grow. 2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for total anti-trans bills considered.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. This was built, piece by piece, bill by bill, executive order by executive order. And each time someone said “don’t be dramatic,” another piece got locked into place.
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts described their organization as “radical incrementalists” willing to take a quarter of the enchilada, knowing that ultimately they have an ideal position that would be much stronger.
They are not hiding. They are telling you exactly what they are doing and counting on you to think it’s too extreme to be real.
It is real. And silence is a choice.
The Harm Is Not Abstract. It Is Happening in Human Bodies.
Let me tell you what this legislation actually does to people. Not in policy terms. In human terms.
Transition saves lives. That is not an opinion. That is documented medical reality backed by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, and every major medical body that has studied it. Gender-affirming care reduces suicidal ideation, reduces depression and anxiety, and improves quality of life for trans individuals.
When you ban that care, people die. Not metaphorically. Literally.
When you pass bathroom bills, trans people — particularly trans women — are forced to choose between using a bathroom that outs them to potential violence or not leaving their homes. Trans women face some of the highest rates of violent assault of any demographic. You are not protecting anyone by forcing them into spaces where they are in danger.
When you strip identity documents — Kansas Senate Bill 244 bans transgender people from updating gender markers on identity documents — you force people to carry legal documentation that outs them every time they show ID. Every job application, every medical appointment, every traffic stop becomes a potential moment of exposure and danger.
When you make it a criminal offense for trans people to use bathrooms that match their gender identity, as Utah and Florida have done, you are criminalizing the act of needing to use a restroom. You are making survival illegal.
And when you call these people terrorists, you give permission to every person who already hates them to escalate.
Words have consequences. Laws have consequences. Budgets have consequences.
The Bill List They Don’t Want You to Read
This is not a fringe movement. This is coordinated, funded, and relentless. Here is a fraction of what has been passed or is actively moving:
Healthcare bans: Medical providers in six states face felony charges for providing gender-affirming care to minors. The Trump administration has moved to restrict Medicare coverage for gender-affirming care for adults, with the Heritage Foundation explicitly pushing to outlaw it entirely for everyone.
Bathroom and facility bans: Nineteen states now ban transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity in various government-owned buildings, including schools. Several states have expanded these bans to libraries, museums, colleges, and all government buildings.
Identity document restrictions: Kansas SB 244 stripped trans people’s ability to update gender markers. Arkansas requires gender to be displayed on all driver’s licenses. Multiple states are moving to invalidate previously updated documents.
Education and pronoun laws: Public school teachers who want to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns would be required under Project 2025 to obtain written permission from the student’s legal guardian. Missouri attempted to put teachers who supported a student’s social transition on the sex offender registry.
Military ban: Trans people are banned from serving in the US military. Thousands of active service members have been placed in limbo — still on payroll but barred from doing their jobs.
DEI elimination: Federal health agencies, including the CDC, purged all data referencing LGBTQ+ people from their websites. The administration has made clear it rejects data collection that includes queer people at all. You cannot address what you refuse to count.
The FBI budget proposal sits on top of all of this as the capstone. Not the beginning. The escalation.
Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation: This Is the Blueprint
Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch, authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has spent decades opposing LGBTQ rights.
Project 2025 equates being transgender — or adopting “transgender ideology” — to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed.
This is not a fringe position. This is in a 920-page policy document that currently serves as the operational playbook for the United States federal government. By the end of 2025, analysis showed the administration had implemented roughly half of Project 2025’s goals.
At a 2022 Heritage Foundation dinner, Trump endorsed the organization, saying it was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
The Heritage Foundation and its 100 coalition partners — including Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, and Turning Point USA — have spent years writing model legislation, funding legal challenges, and placing personnel inside the administration. This is not a spontaneous culture war. This is an organized, well-funded, long-term project with a clear goal:
The legal elimination of trans and queer people from public life.
Not metaphorically. Literally. If you cannot update your documents, use a bathroom, receive medical care, serve your country, be counted in government data, or be supported by a teacher, you have been legally erased.
The FBI terrorism designation is the weapon they’re building to enforce that erasure.
Christian Nationalism Is Not Christianity
I want to be precise here because it matters.
What is driving this legislation is not Christianity. It is Christian nationalism — a political ideology that uses the language and symbols of Christianity to justify the capture of state power for a specific cultural vision of America.
Real Christianity, in every tradition I have encountered, centers on love, compassion, the care of the marginalized, and the radical welcome of those society excludes. Jesus, in every account, spent his time with the people the powerful wanted gone.
Christian nationalism centers power, conformity, and punishment. It uses God as a justification for policies that harm the vulnerable and protect the powerful. It is, in the most honest reading, the opposite of what it claims to be.
We are not the threat to their faith.
We are the people their faith is supposed to protect.
What You Do Now
You do not get to read this and go back to your day unchanged. Not anymore. The window for comfortable passivity closed.
Here is what fighting looks like:
Know the organizations doing the work: ACLU, GLAAD, Trans Legislation Tracker (translegislation.com), the Trevor Project, PFLAG, Egale Canada. Follow them. Fund them if you can.
Contact your representatives. In the US, the budget still has to pass Congress. Call your senators and representatives. Not email — call. Five calls from constituents is considered significant. You have five minutes.
Show up for the trans people in your life. Ask them how they are. Believe them when they tell you. Don’t make them educate you about their own oppression while they’re surviving it.
Use your platforms. Share this. Share the tracker. Share the facts. The Heritage Foundation is counting on you not knowing what’s in that 920-page document. Prove them wrong.
Vote like lives depend on it. Because they do.
I didn’t ask to wake up with that weight in my chest. I didn’t ask to spend my morning writing this instead of doing literally anything else.
But here we are.
They called us terrorists. They built a budget around it. They have been working toward this for a decade, with the patience and funding of an institution that considers itself on the right side of God.
We are not terrorists. We are people. We are your neighbours, your coworkers, your family members, your friends.
And we are not going quietly.
Sources: Fortune, Axios, The Advocate, Washington Blade, Trans Legislation Tracker (translegislation.com), ACLU, GLAAD, The 19th, Guttmacher Institute, Wikipedia/Project 2025, Prism Reports.
